attacked while waiting out there for you. But, in fact, she and an accomplice called you, played her message, and got you out there for the sole purpose of you and Mrs. Campbell finding her in that position. That, sir, is the only logical explanation for that sequence of events, for you leaving her there alone, for you going to the Fowlers and telling them to take care of it, for you staying behind in their house and waiting for them to return with your daughter and with her humvee, and for you not reporting a word of this until this moment. You were very angry with her for what she did.”
General Campbell sat there, deep in thought, contemplating, perhaps, his options, his life, his mistake a few nights ago, his mistake ten years ago. Finally, he said, “My career is ended, and I’ve drafted a resignation that I will submit tomorrow after my daughter’s funeral. I suppose what I’m thinking about now is how much you have to know to find the murderer, how much I want to confess to you and to the world, and what good it would do anyone to further dishonor my daughter’s memory. This is all self-serving, I know, but I do have to consider my wife and my son, and also the Army.” He added, “I’m not a private citizen, and my conduct is a reflection on my profession, and my disgrace can only serve to lower the morale of the officer corps.”
I wanted to tell him that the morale of the senior officers at Fort Hadley was already low as they all waited for the ax to fall, and that, indeed, he wasn’t a private citizen and had no reasonable expectation to be treated like one, and that, yes, he sounded a little self-serving and that his daughter’s reputation was not the issue at hand, and to let me worry about how much I had to know to find the murderer, and, last but not least, his career was, indeed, over. But instead, I told him, “I understand why you did not notify the MPs that your daughter was staked out naked on the rifle range—indeed, General, it was a private matter up until that point, and I confess to you I would have done the same thing. I understand, too, why and how the Fowlers got involved. Again, I confess, I would probably have done the same thing. But when the Fowlers returned and told you that your daughter was dead, you had no right to involve them in a conspiracy to conceal the true nature of the crime, and no right to involve your wife in the conspiracy as well. And no right, sir, to make my job and Ms. Sunhill’s job more difficult by sending us up false trails.”
He nodded. “You’re absolutely correct. I take full responsibility.”
I took a deep breath and informed him, “I must tell you, sir, that your actions are offenses that are punishable under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.”
He nodded again, slowly. “Yes, I’m aware of that.” He looked at me, then at Cynthia. “I would ask one favor of you.”
“Yes, sir?”
“I would ask that you do everything you can to keep the Fowlers’ name out of this.”
I was prepared for that request, and I’d wrestled with the answer long before General Campbell asked. I looked at Cynthia, then at the general, and replied, “I can’t compound this crime with a crime of my own.” In fact, I’d already done that by striking a deal with Burt Yardley. But that was offpost stuff. This was not. I said, “The Fowlers found the body, General. They did not report it.”
“They did. To me.”
Cynthia said, “General, my position is somewhat different from Mr. Brenner’s, and though detectives are never to disagree in public, I think we can keep the Fowlers out of this. In fact, Colonel Fowler
General Campbell looked at Cynthia for a long time, then nodded.
I was not happy, but I was relieved. Colonel Fowler, after all, was perhaps the only officer who’d shown some degree of honor and integrity throughout, including not screwing the general’s daughter. In truth, I did not possess that kind of willpower myself, and I was in awe of a man who did. Still, you don’t give something for nothing, and Cynthia understood that, because she said to the general, “But I would like you, sir, to tell us what actually happened out there, and why it happened.”
General Campbell sat back in his chair and nodded. He said, “All right, then. The story actually begins ten years ago… ten years ago this month at West Point.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-EIGHT
General Campbell related to us what had happened at Camp Buckner, West Point’s field training area. In regard to the actual rape, he knew not much more than we did, or, probably, the authorities did. What he did know was that, when he saw his daughter at Keller Army Hospital, she was traumatized, hysterical, and humiliated by what had happened to her. He told us that Ann clung to him, cried, and begged him to take her home.
He offered the information that his daughter told him she was a virgin, and that the men who raped her made fun of this. She told him that the men had pulled off her clothes and staked her on the ground with tent pegs. One of the men had choked her with a rope while he was raping her, and told her he’d strangle her to death if she reported the assault.
Neither I nor Cynthia, I’m sure, expected the general to provide these small, intimate details. He knew that this incident was only related to the murder in a peripheral way, and there was no clue there regarding her murderer. Yet, he wanted to talk, and we let him talk.
I got the impression, though he didn’t address the issue directly, that his daughter expected him to see to it that justice was done, that there was no question that she’d been brutally raped, and that the men who’d done it were to be expelled from the military academy and prosecuted.
These, of course, were reasonable expectations for a young woman who’d been trying her damnedest to live up to Daddy’s expectations, who had put up with all the hardships that were part of life at West Point, and who had been criminally assaulted.
But there were some problems, it seemed. First, there was the question of Cadet Campbell being alone with five men in the woods at night. How did she get separated from the forty-person patrol? By accident? On purpose? Second, Cadet Campbell could not identify the men. They not only wore camouflage paint, but they had mosquito nets over their faces. It was so dark, she couldn’t even identify the uniforms and could not say for certain if the men were other cadets, West Point cadre, or soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division. In all, there were close to a thousand men and women on training exercises that night, and the chance of her identifying her five attackers was almost nil, according to what General Campbell had been told.
But this was not precisely true, as Cynthia and I knew. By process of elimination, you could begin to narrow the field. And as you got closer to the perpetrators, it was inevitable that one of them would crack to save himself from long jail time. And also you had semen tests, saliva tests, hair tests, fingerprints, and all the other magic of forensic science. In fact, gang rapes were easier to solve than solitary rapes, and I knew that, Cynthia certainly knew it, and I strongly suspected that General Campbell knew it.
The real problem was not identifying who did it; the problem was that the rapists were either cadets, cadre, or soldiers. The problem was not in the area of police science, but in the area of public relations.
Basically, it came down to the fact that five erect penises penetrated one vagina, and the entire United States Army Military Academy at West Point could be torn apart in the same act that had torn Ann Campbell’s hymen imperforatus. These were the times that we lived in; rape was not an act of sex—consensual sex is easily available. Rape was an act of violence, a breach of military order and discipline, an affront to the West Point code of honor, a definitive no vote against a co-ed academy, against women in the Army, against female officers, and against the notion that women could coexist with men in the dark woods of Camp Buckner, or the hostile environment of the battlefield.
The exclusive male domain of West Point had been infiltrated by people who squatted to piss in the woods, as that colonel at the O Club bar would put it. During the academic year, in the classroom, it wasn’t intolerable. But out in the woods, in the hot summer night, in the dark, men will revert to ancient modes of behavior.
The entire field training experience, as I remember too well, was a call to arms, a call to war, a call to bravery, and an intentional imitation of a primitive rite of passage for young men. There were no women in the
